The film was Sátántangó (1994), a seven-and-a-quarter hour adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel about a superstitious rural community thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a mystic poet. Shot in monochrome on the Great Plains over the course of two years, it matched Krasznahorkai’s long-running sentences with extended, unbroken takes, starting with an eight-minute prologue observing cattle swarming across a market square and through the muddy backroads of its woebegone setting.
Comprising 150 shots in total, often stalking hunched figures trudging down wind-tossed lanes, the film used the extra time to better define the parameters of a place and the vulnerabilities of a people swayed by the false prophet in their midst. In passing, Tarr’s camera caught microclimates, shifting affections and suspicions, and memorably – often hellishly – boozy nights at the village pub, but these were details within the bigger picture of lives going nowhere, and people marching headlong into existential dead ends.
The effect was strikingly lugubrious, prompting understandable concern for the real-life safety of a cat seen being tortured at one point. (Tarr insisted the scene was performed under veterinary supervision, and wondered why we weren’t more concerned about the two-legged participants.) Yet the engulfing darkness was frequently illuminated by droll flashes of wit, like the fate of the bibulous doctor (played by Peter Berling) who staggers out to replenish his pear brandy reserves in the film’s opening movement.
Upon first release, the consensus was that there had been nothing quite like it – and certainly few book-to-film adaptations that felt so complete. The debate was how a film that looked so conspicuously out of time spoke to the pre-millennial moment. Sátántangó was only funded after the collapse of Communist rule in Hungary, its underpinning narrative speaking to the curious spell fearmongering demagogues can cast on an especially credulous populace.
Some observers embraced the film as an alternative to the then-dominant Hollywood norm; there was a cosmic irony in the fact a film so doggedly pursuing its own path at its own pace should emerge in the same year as Jan de Bont’s relentless thriller Speed (1994). For his part, Tarr insisted the film should speak for itself: “When we are making a movie, we only talk about concrete situations – where the camera is, what will be the first and the last shot. We never talk about art or God."
The critics filled that void, astonished to discover the medium could still produce something so challenging and absorbing at the same time. Susan Sontag famously declared Sátántangó “enthralling for every minute”, adding she “could watch [it] every year for the rest of her life”. Digitally restored and rereleased to mark its 25th anniversary in 2019, it remained a mountain among movies, the K2 of cinema.
The attenuated nature of a Tarr production – the long, exacting shoots and shots – meant that follow-ups were never immediate, and then few and far between. These depended on the firm bonds connecting the director to a handful of fellow travellers, including Krasznahorkai, the composer and accordionist Mihály Víg (who played the poet in Sátántangó), the cinematographer Fred Kelemen, and the editor Ágnes Hranitzky, whom Tarr married in the early 1980s. As Tarr put it: “I was just the conductor, I put them all together.”
There was nothing quite as monumental as the breakthrough film, but several times Tarr came close to matching its impact. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) – a slip of a film at two hours 25 minutes, composed of just 39 shots – was in the director’s own words “a kind of fairy tale” adapted from Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance. Dreamier and airier than its grounded predecessor, it nevertheless built towards the despairing widescreen image of a rotting whale carcass abandoned on a beach.
The Man from London (2007) signalled Tarr’s growing status within the cinematic and festival ecosystem. A deadpan thriller, adapted from the Georges Simenon novel and fashioned with overseas money, it even featured a recognisable face in the ever-adventurous Tilda Swinton, cast as the railwayman protagonist’s wife.
Tarr bade farewell to cinema with The Turin Horse (2011), composed in just 30 shots running an average of six minutes apiece. A pessimistic riff on the anecdote that sparked Nietzsche’s mental breakdown, the film described the relationship between a father and daughter living a miserly existence in a shack at the end of the world. Here, Tarr pushed his already demanding aesthetic to a new extreme: after some opening narration, no dialogue could be heard for a further 22 minutes.
By now, critics had got a firmer handle on the Tarr approach. In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott wrote: “The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief.”
Tarr, however, knew that this was exactly what distinguished his cinema from the forgettable pablum passing through the multiplexes: “Most films just tell the story: action, fact, action, fact... For me, this is poisoning the cinema because the art form is pictures written in time. It’s not only a question of length, it’s a question of heaviness. It’s a question of can you shake the people or not?”
Béla Tarr was born on July 21, 1955 in the city of Pécs, but raised in Budapest by parents steeped in theatre: his father designed scenery, while his mother worked as a prompter. He briefly found employment as a child actor after his mother took him to auditions for Hungarian state television; he was cast as the protagonist’s son in a TV adaptation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1965).
He had youthful hopes of becoming a philosopher, and initially regarded filmmaking as no more than a hobby, supported by the 8mm camera his parents gifted him for his fourteenth birthday. Plans to attend film school were scuppered after the authorities got wind of his short films, unvarnished non-fiction studies of the country’s poor and working-class. Yet these shorts also drew more sympathetic attention from the administrators of the Béla Balázs Studio, set up in 1959 to assist young artists, and they provided the funding for Tarr to make his feature debut.
Shot in six days, Family Nest (1979) was a claustrophobic example of socialist realism, its narrative enabling a scratchily fictionalised critique of prevailing housing policy. The film shared the Grand Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, and also won grudging respect from the authorities, who belatedly removed Tarr from the film-school blacklist. Tarr followed it with The Outsider (1981), set amongst Budapest’s hedonistic youth.
By Tarr’s own admission, these were in many ways reactive works, but they also demonstrated a growing commitment to pressing issues and marginalised contemporaries: “There were a lot of s**t things in the cinema, a lot of lies. We weren’t knocking at the door, we just beat it down. We were coming with some fresh, new, true, real things. We just wanted to show the reality – anti-movies."
His signature style began to coalesce while filming a TV adaptation of Macbeth (1982) that compressed the play’s action into two extended takes – a five-minute prologue, and a second that lasted just over an hour. Thereafter Tarr’s work became more expressively experimental. Almanac of Fall (1984), a rare diversion into colour, was a doomy character piece set within a tumbledown apartment block; Damnation (1988) was a rain-lashed noir entangling a singer and a barfly. (It received a belated UK release in the wake of Sátántangó.)
Tarr’s influence grew exponentially thereafter: by the first years of the new century, Gus van Sant was crediting him as inspiration for his funny-peculiar Matt Damon/Casey Affleck walkabout Gerry (2002). In 2012, he was elected president of the Association of Hungarian Film Artists; the following year, he opened his own guerrilla film school, known as film.factory, in Sarajevo, operating with the motto “no education, just liberation”. (He served as executive producer on Lamb (2021), a fabular horror directed by film.factory graduate Valdimar Jóhannsson.)
He was the subject of the documentary I Used To Be A Filmmaker (2016), and a 2017 retrospective, Till the End of the World, at Amsterdam’s EYE Filmmuseum. He made a comeback in 2019, overseeing the performance piece Missing People for Vienna’s Festwochen festival, made in response to a new Hungarian law that criminalised the homeless. According to Tarr, who elsewhere labelled the populist Orbán regime as “the shame of our country”, the piece reflected “capitalism and the inhuman system that we have. If you’re not productive, you’re out.”
The reissue of Sátántangó that year provided a rallying cause for those who’d long wished the cinema could develop beyond the usual blandishments and platitudes. As Tarr put it, in characteristically irascible fashion: “People just tell a f**ing story and we believe that something is happening with us. But nothing is happening with us. We are not really part of the story. We are just doing our time, and nobody gives a s**t about what time is doing to us. It’s a huge mistake. I just did it a different way.”
He is survived by Ágnes Hranitzky.
Béla Tarr, born July 21, 1955, died January 6, 2026.
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